


What Eternity Looks Like

by algonquinrt (d0t)



Category: Twilight
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Post Breaking Dawn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-28
Updated: 2012-11-28
Packaged: 2017-11-19 17:42:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/575919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/d0t/pseuds/algonquinrt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If the battle with the Volturi ended differently.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Eternity Looks Like

Esme never mentioned the tire swing.

Nothing about the new property resembled the house back in Forks, or the one in Montana that had followed it. The new house, about an hour away from Rochester, was supposed to be a fresh start, away from any memories. It was a beautiful old farmhouse, with a rambling porch that wrapped around three sides and additions that had been put on in spots haphazardly.

Human Bella would have tripped and fallen walking from room to room, with the often one-inch differences between floors at the doorways. Then again, Human Bella could have cried.

He watched her walk from room to room, drifting in and out and up the stairs like a ghost. She nodded at all the right times when questions were asked, and he thought he saw the wisp of a smile when Emmett introduced her to a family of cats in the huge red barn that stood to the left of the long, gravel driveway. Rosalie had already claimed the barn as a garage for the cars, but the cats had their own spot, and one of them had a litter of kittens. 

Alice asked Bella if she wanted to name them, but she’d already floated away.

There was a garden, fenced in to keep rabbits and deer away, but they’d have no use for that. Still, maybe she’d like it. It was far enough from the road that no one would see her in the sun, and maybe pulling weeds and taking care of plants -- and watching out for the kittens -- would give her something to do, something to take care of. Rosalie had the cars and Alice and Esme were already hard at work in the house, giving the rooms an authentic feel. Jasper and Emmett had put their collective foot down about high school and were looking into the local community college.

Bella said nothing at all.

Carlisle had shown them all a map of the property: one hundred twenty sprawling acres that stretched around and behind the house like a piece of pie, with the house at the point. Once she’d explored the whole house, Bella started walking the property, almost like an archaeologist tracing quadrants, like she’d find something out there. Her walks were methodical, but he knew she’d never find what she was looking for out there; it was long gone.

Still, he followed her, if only to reassure himself that she was out there, that she was safe. If she would not let him in, at least she let him follow her silently, each alone with their thoughts. She walked at human speed, drifting over the property like a wraith, day and night. It wouldn’t have surprised him if neighbors had said they’d seen a ghost on the property, if they’d had any neighbors close enough.

On the eighth day of their silent march, he heard Alice’s cry first, then looked up to see a small white house. Really no more than a cottage, it looked like it hadn’t been lived in for some time. The windows were miraculously still intact, but the shades were drawn, and the paint was peeling from the wooden shingles. No one had lived in this house for a very long time.

He looked for Bella, and she was motionless, that preternatural still that only vampires could achieve. It was so odd to see her not moving after all these days of being constantly in motion that at first he didn’t see what she had seen, what had made Alice cry out and run for them.

It was so simple, really: just an old tire suspended from a gnarled tree by a length of fraying rope. With no breeze in the air, it hung there as motionless as Bella, a silent marker that said “Children once played here.”

He should have moved faster. He could hear Alice running, hear her thoughts in his head, and still he didn’t move, didn’t act, didn’t do anything.

And then she screamed.

It was the first sound she had made in all that time and he should have been glad she made any sound at all, but it was a hysterical scream that could shatter glass.

Instead, it shattered his heart.

He watched her fall, watched her curl up in the tall, brown grass as she’d once curled up in the dead leaves of a forest while she screamed and cried. Watched his sister run to her and try to pull her up, try to hold her, try to wrap her in hard arms that would do nothing to comfort her.

This time, there was nothing to fix. He could not return and make things better. He could not fill the empty place in her heart.

He watched them for a few minutes, listened to the screaming as it went on and on. He pushed the tire swing with one finger and watched it move, back and forth, back and forth. 

He turned and walked back to the house. 

~

Hours later, he was on a bed marked as theirs that neither of them had ever used, ever even touched. He was on his back, looking up at the ceiling, staring at the light texture that showed that layer upon layer of paint had been added over the years. Layer upon layer, coating over to hide a ceiling and walls that had seen other people’s joy, other people’s pain, heard other people’s tears and shouts and laughter.

He wondered why he wasn’t able to put a new layer on himself and hide the one that had seen and heard and loved. Slap on a fresh coat and have a new start. 

He heard footsteps. Slow and shuffling, which meant Bella. Light and tentative, which meant Alice was with her and trying to match her usual frenetic pace to her sister’s. He thought about moving, about turning on his side to face her when she came through the bedroom door. Thought about turning toward the window so his back would face her, letting her know without words he wasn’t ready to speak, but in the end, he was just too tired, so he stayed where he was: on his back, on the white chenille bedspread with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling.

He felt the mattress dip as she sat on the edge of the bed, heard Alice’s feet as she flitted out of the room, reciting some esoteric Russian folk tale in her head. That meant he and Bella would talk, but there was nothing left to talk about, nothing left to say. He’d tried talking to her in the days and the weeks after, talked until his voice would have gone hoarse if he’d been human, but she’d pulled so far into herself that he could no longer reach her. 

The part of his brain that retained all the knowledge from medical school kept diagnosing her: catatonic schizophrenia? She exhibited waxy flexibility, where Alice could literally pose her like a Barbie doll as she changed her clothes each day and gave her sponge baths, and she did not move, did not blink, did not acknowledge he was there. But there was no treatment for vampires, no drugs to cure her, and finally, Esme was the one who stood up and said they had to leave, had to start somewhere new, somewhere they hadn’t been before, where they could all make new memories, and so they’d packed her up in a car like a doll and driven here.

First she’d walked. Then she’d screamed. And now she was here, sitting on the edge of the bed and he had no idea what to do. All his words had dried up.

“You were right.”

They were the first words she’d said in three years, and yet he couldn’t find himself to react. Of course he hadn’t been right. He hadn’t been right about anything. None of them had. They’d trusted that life had moments of happy endings, that right always won out over wrong, that good would triumph over evil.

No one ever said evil doesn’t lie down and die. It comes back and it takes everything and then some. It gives you a period of respite and then, when you least expect, it rips out all the good in your world and leaves this hollow space nothing can fill.

When you live for eternity, that hole gets bigger, not smaller.

“You said I’d regret this. I do.”

Though he no longer needed to breathe, he still gasped, still had to inhale the pain those seven words brought him. She could have reached into his chest and torn out his still, unbeating heart and caused him less pain. He could have watched her stomp it on the ground and turn it to mash and been less affected. All her promises -- the foundation their eternity was based on -- ripped out from under him with seven little words, eight short syllables. 

But still she kept going, kept burying him with words that tore at him, sharper than claws or teeth ever could have. 

"You told me I was too young to know what I'd be giving up. If there had never been-- If she had never existed, I still might never have known. But I know now. I know and I want that and my arms are so empty."

He wanted to scream until the windows shattered. To go back in time and take it all back -- every second -- to not have her hurting like this. To not walk into that biology lab. To not let the family move back to Forks. To not return after he left her. Even that emptiness she felt couldn't possibly compare to this.

"I'd take it back if I could," he whispered.

She looked at him with eyes that were dead, that held nothing. He could have handled hate or anger or even sadness. But all he saw were deep brown wells of nothing. Her hand moved, an almost spastic reflexive action, and he wasn't sure if she'd meant to reach out and touch him or gesture in some other way. In the end, she folded her hands in her lap, and the six inches between them felt like six thousand miles.

"I don't know what I'd want you to take back," she said. "I just know that you told me I had no idea what forever was. I do now. I know what eternity looks like, and I know I have to live this forever. Until the sun burns right out of the sky. Maybe past that. And it's unbearable."

He had no words for her. He tried to summon them, to open up and let her in and tell her that she wasn't alone, that her grief was his, too, and the family's. But she was gone again before he could open his eyes. 

He made no move to follow her. There was nothing for him to say.

~

Two days have gone by before he tries to seek out her company. Alice and Esme had come to the bedroom, sat on the bed, hovered around trying to draw him out, but he had no words for them either. 

When he finally had something in mind to say to her, he looks for her first in the house, then in the barn. The rest of the family seems to regard him with sympathy, but Rosalie offered no more than a roll of her eyes.

She'd warned them both, he remembered. 

It was raining, the water coming down in sheets. Only one place drew him, and he knew that would be where Bella was. When he reached the little cottage with the tire swing, she was there, as he'd expected, looking much like she'd been sitting there since she'd left him. Long enough, at any rate, that the water was puddling around her like she was a statue.

He wondered if any birds or other small animals would have ignored their instincts and come near her as still as she was. He wondered if he turned around and went back to the house if she'd stay where she was and never move again, sitting there until the grass grew up around her and ivy wound its way over from the tree to tie her to the ground.

He wondered if that would make her happier than trying to go on with this semblance of living.

He sat next to her in the rain, close enough that a human flinch would have their skin touching. But they weren't human and that hundredth of an inch would remain as long as neither of them moved.

"At least once an hour," he began, "I wish I could tear his head off again. I wish I could do it again and again and again. I wish I could cause him pain, set fire to him. Make his blood run."

She didn't answer.

"But he has no blood and he's already ash scattered to the winds. And even that is not enough. It will never be enough. I have all this anger. I want to go back to Volterra--"

She flinched, and brushed against him for just a second, but he went on.

"I want to go back to Volterra and tear it all down, brick by brick, with my hands. And find each speck of dust that his ask became and crush it under the bricks of the palace he lived in. And still that wouldn't be enough.

"And then I think back to that day in the meadow. How everything went so wrong. How Alice didn't see everything that could happen. How your plan didn't work. How hard you tried to work around everything and still we failed. And I try to think that at least one good thing came of it. That the Volturi are gone and no one will die like that ever again, simply because some ancient vampire who rarely went out in the world didn't know everything."

At that she moaned, a sound so low in her throat no human would have heard her. He sensed her tensing her muscles, drawing into herself. He'd hoped to get a reaction -- any reaction -- out of her, whether she finally cried without tears or attacked him and tore his limbs from his body.

He'd have welcomed the pain.

Instead, she drew back into herself. Back into the silent wraith who'd haunted their houses for six years now. Six years that passed in the blink of an eye to a vampire but dragged on endlessly when you longed for the sound of your mate's voice.

He tried to touch her, to place a hand on her arm, but like every other attempt, it was rebuffed. It was the only time she moved at her vampire speed: when she was removing herself from any chance of touching him.

He left her to her silent haunting of the property and went back into the house for dry clothes.

~

Two months went by before he attempted to talk to her again. Two months of whispered conversations and chanting in languages inside their heads they hoped he'd never learned. In the end, it didn't matter, because he paid little attention to them. His focus was solely on Bella, on where she went on the property, of how many days she returned to the tire swing.

When he thought he had words again for her, he tried once more to approach her. She stood near the tree, gently pushing the swing and watching it ghost along its trajectory. Not for the first time, he wondered why she continued to torment herself like this, to return again and again to the place on the property that caused her the most pain.

He also wondered what Alice had seen that kept the family from taking down the swing, from ripping the tiny white cottage apart, from moving from this place altogether. Surely there was some other place they could start over once more, someplace that would drag them all out of this never-ending gloom that surrounded them all.

The words didn't come right away. Instead, he watched her as she pushed the swing in a perfect rhythm. The others hadn't approached them about joining them in their college classes or trying to get jobs here. They'd left them to their own devices: the ghost haunting the property and the ghost's intermittent stalker.

Funny how he often felt creepier when he followed her now than he ever had back in Forks when she'd been human and he'd watched her sleep. Her grief seemed so private that he felt he was intruding even when she showed no emotion at all. It was antithetical to being part of a couple, to being married, to sharing the same period of mourning and yet they were separated by an insurmountable wall at the moment.

"What do you feel when you're here?" he asked, though it was the last thing he'd wanted to open a conversation with.

She didn't look up, didn't acknowledge his presence for long moments. He had nearly given up and turned back to the house when she spoke.

"I feel open," she said.

He waited to see if there was more.

"When I'm with the others, I feel like I'm a Mason jar, and the seal can't be broken, yet there's all this pressure building up inside me. That I'll scream if I have to spend another second with them trying to get me to talk or help them decorate or care about homework from college courses. 

"When I come here, it's like I'm able to open the top and all that pressure comes bubbling out. Like lava. Like boiling jelly. And even if I let it bubble over the sides and it makes a huge mess, there's no one around to see me," she said.

Boiling jelly. He had no idea what to do with that.

"But you don't--" he tried.

"No, I don't. I don't cry and I don't scream and I don't do much of anything. That would imply I had some type of control over this, and I don't. It controls me. Don't you see that? Can't you try to understand?"

He did, and at the same time, he didn't. He knew he was bound to her but he'd never realized how different they were. He'd only looked at how intensely they'd loved, at how well she blended in with his family, at how they blended together into EdwardandBella. He'd never stopped to look at how she dealt with feelings, at the fact that the single time they'd parted, they'd both kept things bottled up and she'd been catatonic, even as a human, for three months, while he'd tried to get himself killed after trying to track a psychotic vampire for months.

One violent. One bottled.

"I don't know what to do," he said. "I can't make it better. And I don't know how to talk to you."

She finally looked at him then, her eyes the same dull brown, devoid of emotion that they'd been every other time they'd looked at each other in the intervening years.

"I don't expect you to. You told me once that vampires rarely change. That it takes something huge to change their lives. Do you remember? I've been changed. This is the new reality, and I don't see anything that's going to change that."

"You can't live like this."

"That's just it. This isn't living. This is existing. It's my new existence. You need to find your own."

He was dismissed.

He stumbled on his way back to the house, so caught up in his thoughts that they overrode even his reflexes. Perhaps they'd all have been better off that day if he'd killed them all.

~

Alice hovered in his doorway. He considered the bedroom his now, because other than that single day, Bella had never entered the room. There was a possibility she had a space of her own in the house he simply hadn't bothered to look for, but he had the feeling the only place she called her own was the run-down cottage and the tree with the tire swing.

There was never a need to acknowledge her; she always spoke when she wanted to.

"Things get fixed here. But I didn't see them taking this long. Both of you keep making choices that change things and drag it out. You need to fix this. The family can't keep going like this."

"Then maybe the family should move on without us," he replied.

"You have to fix this."

"How exactly do you want me to do that?" His tone was biting. "How can I fix it? She wants the one thing I can't give her: another baby. We lost a child, and you can't understand that. The only one who possibly can is Esme, and I don't see her telling me to fix it. Nor is Rosalie. We had a child -- a one-of-a-kind miracle -- and now she's gone and we can't get that back. And Bella realized in that moment she gave up her ability to have more for an eternity of sparkly skin and mourning her humanity."

He should have known Alice would have set it up, would have orchestrated the moment to fit her goals. 

It had taken six-plus years, but he finally, finally heard Bella sob.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally going to be posted as a sock account entry for the Angst contest on FFn but the minimum word count was 5K there, and I didn't want to stretch this out artificially to hit it. So here, in its own short length, is the first Twific I've written in over three years. Enjoy the angst.


End file.
